Professor Tom Cooney:

I would like to pick up on a couple of points. I agree with Mr. O’Sullivan’s comment about STEM students. I teach entrepreneurship, primarily to business students. I have said for many years we are teaching the wrong students. I usually say “don’t quote me on this” but cannot say it today because I will be quoted. We should be teaching entrepreneurship to STEM students because they are the ones with the cutting edge. As a country we do not need more entrepreneurship, we need more innovative entrepreneurship that is cutting edge and internationally orientated. That is more likely to come from the STEM students than from business students. Business students have a role to play but the cutting edge work comes from the STEM students. Entrepreneurship should cut across all faculties in our educational institutions at higher level. There are very good examples of that in Northern Ireland where all faculties receive entrepreneurship education, particularly in Queen’s University.

The rewards system is based on publications and citations which poses another challenge. To be a professor depends on how many articles one has published. That is the primary mechanism. If patents, licences, outputs and commercialisation were recognised that would help push people in that direction.

The Irish Research Council has an excellent programme called the enterprise partnership scheme under which students do one third of their Ph.Ds in university and two-thirds in an enterprise. That has been very successful in transferring technology from Ph.D. level research into company activity. There are other examples of that, such as the employment partnership scheme, under which working together on research, not only in the laboratory but also in the company helps to build those bridges. Those are three areas where we could take immediate action to bridge the gap in commercialisation.